Damilola Karpov is a pilot. Living in Byzantium, a huge sky city floating above the land of Urkaine, he makes his living as a drone pilot - capable of being a cameraman who records the events unfolding in Urkaine or, with the weapons aboard his drone, of making a newsworthy event happen for his employers: 'Big Byz Media'. His recordings are known as S.N.U.F.F.: Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film. S.N.U.F.F. is a superb post-apocalyptic novel, exploring the conflict between the...
The short stories of Victor Pelevin are as individual, reality-warping and endlessly inventive as his novels, moving effortlessly between different genres and moods, bursting with absurd wit and existential satire. In The Blue Lantern he brings together sex-change prostitutes, melancholy animals and a cabinful of young boys obsessed by death. Sidestepping the world we take for granted, these stories show in miniature the fantastical talent for which the Observer acclaimed Pelevin's work as 'the...
They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms which open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue which they cannot escape - a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. It's wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal...